By KAREN MADORIN
Normally I avoid sequels. I don’t want to know what happened after Rhett left Scarlet standing in the door with his famous line echoing in her mind. However, I must write part two to the hedge apple saga. If I don’t, readers could enter the next bug cycle with unfounded hope.
Before I address this fruit’s insect deterrent capabilities, I’ll fill readers in on why I found a million shreds of hedge apple under the big cedar tree. I spent enough time observing out the window that I caught the culprit at work.
My husband told me squirrels had done the deed, but I couldn’t imagine how such a wee creature could wreak such havoc. (Silly me. I lost a sweater and a pair of tennis shoes to a mouse living in a school closet.) He was right. Squirrels love hedge apples.
We put a few more ugly globes out on the porch to tempt the guilty party, and then we watched. It took a while to catch the critter in the act, but I saw one squirrel lift and carry a large hedge apple in its mouth to the cedar. Apparently, another squirrel observed this feat and, inspired, grabbed its own green brain off the porch to lug down the hill.
That explained the movement of hedge apples from one locale to another. Watching longer, I saw the apples shredded. In moments, the squirrels tore their respective orbs into thousands of tiny pieces. As they shredded, they flung, leaving me to think squirrels find only a small portion of this meal edible. Once they found that little chunk, they tossed the waste like confetti.
So much for the mystery of the moved and shredded hedge apples. Now for the truth about hedge apples as insect deterrent. After reading the Internet site selling hedge apples as natural insect deterrent, I placed a number of them around the house in places we find hordes of box elder beetles aka Ellis bugs. (We named them Ellis bugs when a tiny neighbor called the black and orange insects Ellis bugs. Her big brother wore black and orange as an Ellis Railer, so black and orange bugs should logically be Ellis bugs.)
I tucked a hedge apple in my closet and in the coat closet for good measure. My first hint about their lack of suitability as a solution to box elder bugs was the pungent odor that wafted out every time I opened the closet door. However, thinking about inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, I could not give up too soon.
While I gave those hedge apples every opportunity to send the box elder bugs outside for a breath of fresh air, another infestation occurred in my bedroom closet. Hedge apples are a fruit, right? Fruit flies like fruit, right? Fruit flies really like ripe fruit, right? Right.
We traveled overnight, and when I returned my clothes to my closet, horrors awaited! I’d collected a hedge apple containing fruit fly larvae. Now, I had a closet full of them. Thirty years earlier, this would have been grand when I required them for a biology genetics experiment. This was thirty years too late.
Fortunately, I didn’t pay $1.50 for each hedge apple. Even more fortunate was the fact that only one hedge apple spawned a swarm of fruit flies. Otherwise, I’d have swatted pests for days
Beware of Internet ads. When experimenting, select a small test zone, and prepare for the unexpected. Certainly, Edison and Bell made their own mistakes. In fact, Edison said something along this line, I have not made a thousand mistakes inventing the light bulb. I have merely found a thousand ways not to make a light bulb. Well, I found another way not to deter insects.